"EVE Online's complicated inter-corporate politics are often held together by fragile diplomatic treaties and economic agreements. So fragile, in fact, that a single misclick can lead to a fracas that quickly snowballs into all-out warfare. That's what happened to two of the spacefaring sandbox MMO's largest player alliances in the Battle of Asakai, a massive fleet vs. fleet onslaught involving 3,000 players piloting ships ranging from small interceptors to gargantuan capital ships. Straight from the wreckage-strewn outcome of the battle, we're breaking down the basics of what happened for everyone to truly fathom one of the biggest engagements in the game's history." The costs of this battle in in-game currency is, so far, 700 billion. While MMO's don't float my boat, I have to say that this is still pretty awesome. Penny Arcade looks at the technical details server-side, and what a battle like this does to the game's backend infrastructure.

I'd like to know why they need to disconnect people when they shift a solar system from one node to another.

As far as I can tell, EVE Online uses separate servers (where the client disconnects from the previous node and connects to the new node when the player "warps" from one solar system to another), and they're lying about it being a distributed system.

It's like pretending that having completely separate web servers where there's HTML links from one site (e.g. osnews.com) to another site (e.g. penny-arcade.com) constitutes a "distributed system" because the user's client (web browser) can switch between separate servers when they click on a HTML link.

As far as I can tell, EVE Online uses separate servers (where the client disconnects from the previous node and connects to the new node when the player "warps" from one solar system to another), and they're lying about it being a distributed system.

You just described a textbook example of a distributed system, but then criticized it for calling itself one... Why on earth did anyone mod you up?

It's like pretending that having completely separate web servers where there's HTML links from one site (e.g. osnews.com) to another site (e.g. penny-arcade.com) constitutes a "distributed system" because the user's client (web browser) can switch between separate servers when they click on a HTML link.

??? The World Wide Web is a distributed system - the poster child for one actually. Really, try to find a definition of the term that doesn't site it as the prime example.

"As far as I can tell, EVE Online uses separate servers (where the client disconnects from the previous node and connects to the new node when the player "warps" from one solar system to another), and they're lying about it being a distributed system.

You just described a textbook example of a distributed system, but then criticized it for calling itself one... Why on earth did anyone mod you up? "

If you want to stretch the definition of "distributed system" to include the "least distributed possible" cases; then you could pretend almost anything is a distributed system (all the way back to the old "telnet into a server" MUDs MUSHes and MOOs) and it becomes meaningless joke. I'm fine with that if that's what you want - let's call it a "barely distributed system" (no fault tolerance, no load balancing, etc; where the entire pile of crud has to be taken down for a few hours every week because they're too stupid to figure out live migration or even handle the complexities of symbolic links).

So; are they lying about it being a "more distributed than everything else" system?